At BKK, Puente Hills : ‘Nosy’ Operators Keep Toxics Out of Landfills

Landfill operators are different from you and me. A wheezing front-loader can disgorge seven tons of odoriferous household garbage at their feet and they see not a gloppy mess, but a chunk of future fairway or pasture.

With a look of visionary ardor, Jack Thompson gazes past the huge welter of coffee grounds, lettuce leaves, plastic bags and unidentifiable refuse on the ground in front of him at the BKK Corp. landfill in West Covina, looking toward a green hill a mile and a half to the west. “That,” said the BKK operations manager, “is what this landfill can look like someday.”

There stands the Industry Hills convention and recreation center, a pristine 600-acre spread of low buildings and trees, with a pair of golf courses, a sports complex and an 11-story hotel, all built on or near 20 years’ worth of terraced trash.

But when he puts aside his visionary focus, Thompson has to take a close look at the stuff on the ground in front of him. Really close. This is the landfill business: a daily series of unremarkable skirmishes with mostly low-grade polluters.

To keep the hazardous wastes out, protecting the foundations of future tracts of greenery, Thompson and his staff test, smell and eyeball about 6,000 tons of new refuse every day.

You have to know exactly what it is that you’re seeding the ground with, waste management experts say, because pollution can denude the environment as implacably as baldness overtaking a middle-aged man. Properly managed, a landfill like BKK can be turned into a ridge-top golf course, with majestic green fairways, or a shady park. Poorly (or illegally) run, it can become a kind of poisonous hole, spreading noxious gases and toxic liquids to surrounding areas.

“Hazardous wastes simply do not stay in place,” said Angelo Bellomo, chief of the state Department of Health Service’s regional toxic substance control division. “If they migrate deep enough, they’ll get into underground water sources.”

BKK has had its own problems with hazardous wastes. For 16 years, it was one of the nation’s busiest toxic waste dumps. But in 1984, under pressure from federal and state regulatory agencies, it stopped taking chemical waste, oil sludge, contaminated soil and other kinds of hazardous wastes. The landfill site, federal inspectors discovered, did not have the kind of impermeable bedrock that had been assumed by the landfill’s planners.

Still, BKK will develop the site. Sometime after 1995, when BKK stops seeding the ground with trash, construction will begin on and around the site. According to BKK Corp. President Kenneth Kazarian, plans call for luxury homes and a complex of light industrial and office buildings on the non-landfill peripheries, with a championship golf course where refuse is now being laid.

“Basically, landfill areas are turned into green space,” Kazarian said.

Extraction Wells

For landfills with hazardous wastes, it’s green space with some additions, added Bellomo. At the West Covina site, the company will have to maintain wells to extract gases and liquids, as well as a system to monitor the containment of all those underground toxics.

But mostly, landfill operators say, protecting landfills from hazardous wastes is just a dull routine, with minimal consequences to the public.

“People often think that hazardous waste is something you die from,” says Arjun Rajaratnam, environmental control manager for BKK. “But that’s not it. It’s usually the things that slowly kill the fish . . . the things that, on a long-term basis, degrade the environment. It’s not usually something lethal.”

There are elaborate procedures in place to protect the environment from pollution at both the privately run BKK and another large San Gabriel Valley landfill, Puente Hills, which is run by the county Sanitation Districts. Both sites employ radioactivity monitors, spot searches and on-the-spot litmus tests to check for acidity. But mostly, managers of the two sites said, dozens of pairs of educated eyes probe into the mounds of garbage and refuse that are hauled in daily.

‘Watching Closely’

“Our people have a vested interest in watching closely what comes out of a truck,” Kazarian said. “No heavy equipment operator wants to run over something in a drum that might cause a reaction.”

Sometimes all the vigilance pays off. Last November, a bulldozer operator spreading out the trash at the Puente Hills landfill noticed a pile of small, unmarked canisters. They had been concealed in a larger load, said Gary Armstrong, supervisor and engineering technician at Puente Hills.

The canisters held calcium hydride, which the military uses as a source of hydrogen to launch weather balloons, he said. “Expose the stuff to moisture, and you could have an explosion. Airtight, they’re fine, but busted open, they pose a problem. Not many things remain intact when they’re run over by a 25-ton Cat (Caterpillar bulldozer).”

The discovery of the 800 canisters, which were allegedly dumped by Palley Supply Co. of Santa Fe Springs, is being investigated by the district attorney’s environmental crimes section, and the company has been billed for $31,000 in cleanup expenses.

It was one in a series of recent hazardous-waste cases involving the two San Gabriel Valley landfills. Criminal charges were filed last month against Western Waste Industries, a Carson trash hauling company, which allegedly took excess from overweight loads of hazardous industrial wastes, concealed it in non-hazardous loads and dumped them in both BKK and Puente Hills. Neither site is equipped to receive hazardous wastes.

Puente Hills is almost twice as big as BKK, absorbing 12,000 tons of trash a day--about 36,000 square feet of compacted garbage. Six days a week, trucks start lining up at 8 a.m. near the bottom of a ridge, which is near the intersection of the Pomona and San Gabriel freeways. Then they begin to wind up a dirt road, past terraces of landfill that have been buried and covered with greenery since the operation began 30 years ago.

The first stop is a scale, where each truck is weighed (computers have a record of the truck’s weight without a load so that the load weight can be calculated) and probed for radioactivity.

“We used to get fairly frequent alarms, because a lot of hospitals didn’t have complete control over their radioactive pharmaceuticals,” said supervising civil engineer Ray Huitric. “A patient who’s been injected with a radiopharmaceutical disposes of a Band-Aid in the ordinary rubbish--and the alarm goes off.”

Industrial Offenders

However, most hospitals have been equipped with radioactivity monitors of their own, Huitric said, and the loads of only a few industrial offenders now produce alarms.

“If we know the source of the radioactivity, we’ll call the company’s radiation safety officer down to help us go through the rubbish,” Huitric said. “They tend to be more careful the next time.”

At the top of the Puente Hills ridge, trucks are directed to the day’s landfill target by traffic managers, who have the watchful, shifty-eyed look of prison guards expecting trouble in the yard. Some day, probably in the next century, this garbage-packed piece of real estate will be turned over to the county Department of Parks and Recreation for use as new parkland.

The air resounds with mechanical grinding sounds as dozens of trucks disgorge their contents onto the ground. A musty rotten-fruit fragrance abounds.

Sometimes, Armstrong said, a different smell intrudes.

“There are rubbish smells, and there are chemical smells,” he said. “We have to look out for the chemical smells.”

That’s just one telltale sign that heavy-equipment operators and the inspectors have to be on the watch for. “You work here for a while, you know what a routine load looks like,” Armstrong said. “If there’s water leaking out, an odor that’s wrong, maybe smoke seeping out of the back, anything that’s not supposed to be happening, you get involved.”

“Mostly I look for barrels,” adds Cat operator John Cox, stepping off his rig for a short break. Enclosed liquids, which can be hidden in wastepaper or household trash, are presumed to be hazardous wastes, Armstrong said.

Inspectors from both the county Department of Health Services and the Sanitation Districts poke through the area, looking for evidence of illegal dumping. Once a day, they separate five randomly selected trucks and give their loads an intensive once-over.

“The haulers all know that at any time their truck could be pulled over to the side for a spot check,” Armstrong said.

At the hand-load area, where gardeners and spring cleaners toss junk by hand off the backs of trucks, inspector Dave Sanchez, a red flag attached to his belt, watches like a cobra all the stuff landing nearby.

“Today, we’re getting the more or less standard items,” he says. “It’s paints and adhesives and solvents--things that come out in household and garage clean-outs. What do I do? I advise them that they’re not permitted to dump that stuff here.”

Although residents with such things as cans of paint, automotive oil, insecticides and pesticides must be turned away, officials do have some advice.

There is a recycling center in Puente Hills that accepts the empty oil cans, the county Agricultural Commission will pick up insecticides and pesticides, and those with partially full cans of paint are advised to use the contents and return with the empty cans. Once a load has been identified as potentially hazardous, inspectors are called in, identifying tests are run and certified waste haulers are contracted to remove the offending refuse.